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Friday, 26 May 2017

Weather conditions denting Black Sea yield prospects

It’s been a busy few days on the weather reporting front in the Black Sea region this week.

First off, Bloomberg picked up on the deluge in Russia’s Stavropol region and cold weather in central areas that could have damaged plants.

They say that some areas in the south, which accounts for about a third of Russia’s total wheat harvest, received as much as three times the normal amount of rain in the two weeks to Tuesday.

This has been confirmed by my contacts there who are saying they can’t even get into fields to inspect crops let alone send the sprayer in so we might see some implications on yield and quality.

last month ProZerno forecast Russia’s wheat crop at 67.1mmt, while IKAR pegged the harvest at 64 to 69mmt, and SovEcon have just raised their forecast by 0.5mmt to 63mmt.

ProZerno and IKAR say they are assessing the impact of the weather before potentially revising output forecasts.

Last month, after our March tour, we pegged the Russian wheat crop at 64.7mmt.

We start the next tour on Monday, kicking off from Stavropol heading north through Russia’s grain belt, at the end of which we will revise our forecast.

Elsewhere in the news, UkrAgroConsult is reporting that cold in Russia’s central black earth region has partially damaged seedlings of sugar beet, corn, buckwheat, sunflower, soya and rape, which if that is true then it would have been cold enough to damage flowering wheat and barley ears.

We will be travelling through that region later in the week and will soon be able to tell if there any cold related issues.

Over in Ukraine and AccuWeather are forecasting hot and dry this summer with “severe impacts” on agriculture.

AccuWeather meteorologist, Tyler Roys, said: “We do expect drought conditions across much of Ukraine, which may damage crops.”

To be honest, it’s unusual for Ukraine not to experience a hot and dry summer, last year was an exception, what is important to know is the condition of the recently planted and emerged spring crops and how they look in terms of coping with hot dry conditions.

The second half of next week will see us travelling across Ukraine assessing just that, so by the end of next week will have a picture of how conditions are affecting this year’s crops and yield prospects.

You can sign up to receive all of this timely and independent information, plus we tour the Black Sea Region on another three occasions this year to provide boots on the ground perspective, all for only £350.

If you would like to subscribe to access the result from this tour and the rest of the tours planned through the 2017 season then email me at blackseacroptour@gmail and I will forward details.

This blog will be running a reduced service next week as we are out and about in Russia and Ukraine assessing the crop condition and yield forecasts.

Black Sea Crop Tours is the only independent crop assessment service operating in the Black Sea region and has been assessing crops since 2014